Election Debate Visualisation

The University of Technology Sydney’s Connected Intelligence Centre (UTS:CIC) is offering three doctoral scholarships as part of the Centre’s doctoral program in Learning Analytics. UTS:CIC, led by EDV’s Simon Buckingham Shum, has as a mission “to invent, evaluate and theorise the design of human-centered data science and learning analytics (…) to nurture in learners the […]

Earlier this week, EDV was the subject of a full-length feature in the Rethinking Debates project. This is the first of a global series of reports on the impact of technology on the electoral process, launched by Civic Hall, a US-based community centre for the world’s civic innovators. After interviewing EDV’s PI Stephen Coleman from […]

Last week, I attended the 1st European Conference on Argumentation, 9-12 June 2015, in Lisbon, Portugal. EDV contributed a paper on our analysis of Fair Play: a semi-automatic method to determine how well participants in an election debate follow the “rules of the game”. In this case, the method uses democratic entitlements as the basis for these rules. The slides […]

Las week, we presented Democratic Replay as a work-in-progress paper at TVX 2015, the ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video, held in Brussels, 3rd-5th June 2015.TVX brings together research and recent developments in academia and industry in a single-track joint venue. The conference opened with a keynote by Jacob Shwirtz, Chief […]

The OU’s Knowledge Media Institute turned 20 years yesterday, and the milestone was celebrated by gathering key people in the Institute’s history. With an agenda focused on celebrating the past but looking forward to the next 20 years, there were talks by the OU’s new Vice-Chancellor, Peter Horrocks; the Vice-Chancellor at the time of the creation of […]

EDV is the cover story of the latest KMi Review, the periodical publication of the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute presenting research highlights, awards, events and other news. The article describes the research we carried out over the 2015 General Election leaders’ debates earlier this month, focusing on Democratic Reflection and on the elicitation of instant audience feedback. You […]

Last week, EDV had a spot on in KMi’s stand on this year’s OU Learn About Fair. The Fair, part of the University’s Charter Day on 23rd April 2015, is an opportunity for showcasing research and innovation across the OU. Our stand featured the latest version of Democratic Replay with enhanced video replays of the recent ITV Leaders’ Debate and one last […]

EDV has been featured in OpenLearn, the OU’s free learning portal. Filed under People, Politics and Law, the piece describes the aims of the project, invites readers to try Democratic Reflection during Thursday’s BBC Challengers’ Debate, and introduces Democratic Replay.

After months of extensive negotiations, broadcasters have finally announced their plans for leaders’ debates and similar events over the British Election Campaign. As we discussed earlier this year, the main election debate will include the leaders of 7 parties: the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems, UKIP, the Green Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, and will take […]

Yesterday evening, a group of 12 OU postgraduate students and members of staff watched the second of Clegg-Farage 2014 Europe debate while they tested the first version of Democratic Reflection, a digital implementation of the audience feedback method we piloted with flashcards last year. Democratic Reflection is available as a mobile web application, that participants could access from their […]